Miscarriage and My Loss of Identity

To this day, one of my greatest struggles with life after miscarriage is rediscovering an identity. When I learned that I was pregnant, I jumped in with both feet. As I mentioned in my first post, I Googled everything under the sun related to pregnancy and parenting. I started an Amazon wish list and piled on the products that fit in with my vision of motherhood. For the first time ever, I could read the mommy blogs without feeling a twinge of jealousy or bitterness. That's when I knew my identity was changing. I realized that I didn't have any reason to be jealous of anyone else's child, because I would soon be a mom, too. Mother was becoming a sure facet of my identity. It was inevitable. It would be permanent. I would always be Mother . . . until suddenly, that wasn't the case.

My first miscarriage preceded Mother's Day by about two months, and I was still completely raw when the holiday rolled around. Two months earlier I considered myself a mother, or at least a mother in the making. What am I now? They don't make Mother's Day cards for women like me. No one in my circle of family or friends knew how to react, so for the most part we all studiously ignored the occasion. I felt like it was an elephant in every room I went in that day--maybe it only felt that way to me. I don't know. What I do remember was feeling like I had been wrong about my identity as a mother. Mothers are acknowledged and celebrated on Mother's Day; it didn't seem to apply to me.

Kate Kripke wrote, "Identity shifting is a huge piece of the postpartum experience for every new parent, and yet moms who lose their babies are not able to show the world their mother-ness. If you feel like a mom, and yet are not able to participate in the experiences that the mothers around you are included in, know that this is a shared experience and that, whether or not the world can see this, we value you as a mother too." (Incidentally, Ms. Kripke's entire post is excellent--I highly recommend you read it at Postpartum Progress). I haven't resolved my mother-ness or un-mother-ness. When your first pregnancy ends in miscarriage, you have no assurances that you were or are a mother; you just have a sort of void in your spirit that reminds you that there used to be something more there.